BRAZIL

In 2006: Break the bourgeois electoral polarization! To construct a revolutionary worker’s alternative!

Article retrieved from the Luta Operária newspaper # 119, January/06

A lot has been spoken about the political perspectives opened for 2006, especially the popular front political crisis accentuated with the corruption scandals occurred into Lula’s government. It is popularly known as “Mensalão Crisis.” Not all of the so called revolutionary Marxist organizations point 2005 as the workers’ class last suppressed mark of illusion with the Worker’s Party (PT) and its pro-imperialist government. Some of these parties even affirmed that 2006 will be the “revenge” year. In other words, they state that it will be a year of massive fight back which would revert a workers’ decade of defeats and refluxes. In the middle of this “opinion chain”, the Unified Workers’ Socialist Party (PSTU)¹, in particular, concluded that the reorganization of the labor activist movement towards the National Fight Coordination (CONLUTAS)², a institutionalized workers’ organization, and the Workers’ Unique Central (CUT)³, a bureaucratized and institutionalized workers’ organization, both profound demoralized, is in fact the major confirmation of 2006 “new” political phase. In different degrees, all of the political forces that proclaim a “new political horizon” for 2006, agree that this year’s general election to be a big mark, a “new beginning” of a fresh national conjuncture.

Trotskyists do not fundament the analyses about the classes’ struggle only in electoral prognostics, even when it looks so “realistic”. In order to characterize a political period, it has to be based on the social classes’ force correlation; on a concrete balance of the proletarian struggle, their victories and lost; and the level of coercion exercised by the dominate class towards the maintenance of the existing order. As significant as they can be, the electoral phenomenon is subordinated to the compressing logic mentioned above. In last instance, without the class struggle, elections do not have proper life. Only the impressionists, who are in service of opportunist politics, can substitute the Marxist class’s struggle analysis for a triumphal panacea projected by electoral polls.

Lula’s government is a direct instrument of the international capital finance. His terrible state management caused a profound degeneration in the government. By promoting a deep cutback of salaries, lack of employment and a breaking down of public services, Lula’s popular front will not face a favorable electoral scenery in 2006. To certain point, the workers had a chance of having their own “experience” with the Workers’ Party (PT) as government. It exposed two mystified concepts used by PT when they call themselves as an “ethical” party and “administrative experts”. The so called “Mensalão Crises” not only presented the most sinister details of the PT’s corruption scandal, but also, without doubt, caused an enormous political corrosion inside the popular front.

The workers’ experience with the popular front and its bourgeois government was, however, very partial and limited. This experience was in fact a big “passive” measure. In other words, the proletarian movement did not react in the same speed and proportion as Lula’s government did when attacking the workers rights (social security reform, minimum wage, privatizations, etc). The workers’ answer to the popular front bourgeois politics never crossed the “defensive” area, even when it went out to the streets to fight as occurred in 2003 during the federal workers’ general strike. In 2005, at the political crises highest point, the masses’ movement maintained itself knotted to reformist politics and its directions. They only took part in “two lobbyist marches” to the National Congress, one in the government’s favor and other against, but both without any time of multitude dimensions. The absence of a workers’ class directed action as a principal player in the political crisis scenery, permitted Lula to trick its imminent social collapse and to transfer the struggle to a pure institutional camp: to the congress and to the approaching 2006 general election. In this favorable basis, as an intention to maintain intact the democratic regime, even an electoral disastrous can be easily avoided with a big accord between the national bourgeoisie and the Yankee imperialism.

In this general mark of political crisis, the workers’ movement did not suppress the classes’ collaboration politics. It did not construct a revolutionary mechanism in order to alter the correlation forces at this actual historical period. In 2002, celebrated by all of the left forces, except the LBI, the popular front “big victory” was projected as an opened reversion against the “neoliberal offensive”. Shortly after the election, it was proven to be a lie. The neoliberal politics only changed their “manager”. Even weakened up by the crises, Lula is continuing to apply the same plans dictated by the International Monetary Fund. It includes: privatizing state companies, ending of social actions, paralyzing the timid agrarian reform, decreasing the miserable minimum wage, etc. All of it occurs with the okay of the Workers’ Unique Central (CUT) and with the lack of action of the “oppositionist” directions. Since the next election’s priority is the revisionist and reformist left big “consensus”, all of these lying actors get their sites ready. On one side Lula’s government begins this spectacle. Since in 2005 the income per person did not achieve the mark of 2% and for that reason he could not use the discourse of Brazilian growth, Lula decided to capitalize votes by promoting an emergency highways project called “Closing the Holes”. The so called “left opposition”, situated in the narrow limits of the bourgeoisie regime, presents the senator Heloisa Helena as their big positive triumph in the political crisis. The senator has a very good position in the electoral polls as an alternative to the presidency. In the same way, the PSTU desperately tries a space in the electoral umbrella of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL)⁴. They are afraid to be requested to present their leader “Zé Maria” as a candidate and that way see most of their militants and sympathizers moving toward the Senator Heloisa Helena’s candidacy. The CONLUTAS, an organization that could be a progressive element in this conjuncture, is persistently being bureaucratized by the PSTU who follows the existing economical and pro-result activist model.

The task that is presented to the workers’ movement, in particular to its vanguard class, is exactly to break up with the approaching vicious bourgeois electoral polarization. On one side we have Lula’s government in connection with its Brazilian “conservative” opposition and on the other side we have the “left” opposition. The workers’ class cannot passively wait until October to “democratically” choose a new IMF manager for Brazil. It is necessary, right now, to prepare in order to resist to a deep salary and employment cut down caused by this government disastrous politics. Lula, who is subservient to the “Washington” dictates, has already showed that he is not dead when it is the case of destroying the workers’ rights. Therefore, it is time to take directed actions and subordinate the approaching elections to a revolutionary strategy towards the construction of a workers’ own alternative of power.

1) PSTU – Founded in 1994 in Brazil, The Unified Workers’ Socialist Party (PSTU) is a section of the Workers’ International League (WIL)_ a pseudo-Trotskyist organization created by the Argentine Nahuel Moreno.

2) CONLUTAS – The National Fight Coordination is a lefty activist association who split up with the Workers’ Unique Central (CUT).

3) CUT – The Workers’ Unique Central is the principal union labor central in Brazil. It has become a unionized instrument of Lula’s government inside the workers’ movement. At the moment, Lula’s Worker’s Minister is the CUT’s ex-president.   

4) PSOL – The Socialism and Liberty Party is a reformist organization created by a group of congressmen and congresswomen who left the Workers’ Party (PT). Its fundamental political expression is the senator Heloisa Helena.